


Sieglinde's Sonata

by The_Exile



Category: Original Work
Genre: Anniversary, F/M, Romance, Spaceships, biomechanical technology, humans are not the dominant species, sentient spaceships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-18
Updated: 2018-04-18
Packaged: 2019-04-24 19:12:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14361837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Exile/pseuds/The_Exile
Summary: To celebrate an anniversary watching the stars go by was supposed to be private, so she cloaked up when they reached orbit.





	Sieglinde's Sonata

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Alobear](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alobear/gifts).



Sieglinde cloaked as she went into high orbit around Algol, looping from one star to the other in figure-of-eight. Stealth was completely unnecessary. Perseus had been friendly controlled for millennia, nigh unoccupied for longer than that except for the occasional nebula gas harvesting expedition such as the one she pretended to be busy with right now. The only dangers were environmental and could not care less whether she was cloaked. However, she had been reading about human relationships, that if she was a human at all and Reinhart was a typical human, they would highly value privacy in a situation considered intimate, such as this.

When she told Reinhart, he laughed and said 'we're more like a young couple skiving off work'.

Upon learning that she was taking him to see Algol for their anniversary, his emotions immediately changed to a heightened elation, flooding her biocomputer with complementary chemicals. The neural sheath still worked, she told her diagnostic systems, satisfied, still as strongly, in both directions. Pilot and ship were in total encephalic synchronisation.

"We're two, but also one, like the binary star," he told her, "We can't help it, it's in our nature, as much as these two with the forces that bind them together. The Universe itself decided we should be together. I think that's why I like this place so much? That, and it's beautiful. All those dark pink clouds, like a sunset. Of course, it's thousands of times more beautiful when I'm plugged in, like everything is."

Sieglinde could empathise with this. Her range and magnitude of senses vastly outnumbered his own, along with an equally expansive database of prior information about this location that could be directly neurally uploaded. What surprised her was how well he handled it, reporting only a slight pain at the mental exertion, a feeling of danger and slight loss of control that he appeared to find sexually euphoric. This, too, was fed back into her own system. For her own part, she fed back pride in his complete compatibility, such advanced progress compared to any other human operator so far, as well as endless fascination with his species' ability to improvise and come up with original ideas on the spot. They were learning new modes of being, not just information about each other. In a few generations' time, humanity would become one of the most perfectly compatible operator species, ready to accept any and all augmentations, to both their benefit.

They could both block these transmissions with certain chemicals if they became a threat to their functioning. Neither of them did except in an emergency such as combat, which didn't tend to happen when your reaction to every encounter was to cloak up and scan it with near indetectible radars before warping off at the highest speeds currently possible.

"Seriously, I'm so glad you remembered our anniversary and planned all of this for us, though," said Reinhart, "You remembered my favourite spot, how I like to view it best. Everything's perfect."

"Accuracy at reading stored recordings of previous human emotional reacts is improving to the next tier. Noted," she replied, her voice softly mechanical and directly projected into his mind as if it were one of his own memories of a sound, being played back to him as he tried to recall it. This was one of the many arrangements he liked to make that surprised her. After she had spent hours practicing various appealing human voices and reciting them over the intercom, mastering the skill of speaking with a physical voice over an humanly audible wavelength, learning his speech patterns and picking out those she decided were supposed to be appropriate to an intimate relationship, he admitted to her that he found her 'usual' voice 'weirdly' attractive. Then he waved his hands around a lot and said that he 'didn't mean it in that way', reassuring her that she was not weird. Personally, she was much more surprised to learn that a human did not find a bio-ship, something unlike any native life form on their planet, their space flight capabilities being so lacking upon the species' discovery that they barely knew how to get to their own barren moon, extremely weird.

She had replied only that she was willing to stick to this rule but would like it if he also used his own, natural voice around her, or at least thought in his usual voice, something that humans tended to do anyway, in her experience. After all, it was difficult to physically speak when his lungs were full of embryonic capsule fluid.

Not all of Reinhart's rules made sense. He still found the sensation of being decontaminated by the ship's scarabs, miniature bio-drones who maintained her own interior, to be uncomfortable, especially when, in his own words, 'they keep going up my nose and I swear they do it on purpose'. Among fellow bio-ships, exchange of such scarabs in a grooming ritual was an important social construct, an expression of trust in each other not to be contaminated enough to infect the drones. Reinhart protested that it was biologically impossible to be dirty in that fluid he spent most of his life in, and humans didn't get biocomputer viruses.

Sieglinde did not have the heart to tell him that his species had been riddled with the things when they were first discovered, so much so that they genuinely believed the malfunctions to be normal working order, that they were still unusually prone to them and that she carefully swept him for them every sleep cycle. She agreed that she would only perform cursory scans for biological infection, only when he was asleep and she would immediately cease when he showed signs of wakefulness, leaving no sensations of anything being up his nose.

He agreed, seeing as she had let him name her. It was only fair, as she could pronounce his name and her own, but he had been unable to remember or physically reproduce all 255 syllables of her name or the pet name she admitted to giving him. She had explained that it was to be thought of more as a song than a sentence but this did not appear to help.

"Sometimes I'd like to keep going forever, you know? Just you and me, among the stars, see how far we can get," he told her.

Sieglinde did not think that going 'among' any stars that were sufficiently close together was conducive to long term survival but she understood the rest of what he was saying. She could easily feed off rock dust and nebula gas, she had the authority to cut off comms in an emergency, could invent any number of excuses when questioned, or just fly into something and pretend her comms had broken in the impact if it came down to it. However, she believed that sticking to the mission, to the overall action plan of her fleet, would in the long term reveal more wonders and delights to the both of them, with more help if anything should ever come in their way.

"See what I mean? You can just suddenly sound so romantic when you want to be," Reinhart told her.

Still unsure how exactly to measure and judge romantic-ness of statements, Sieglinde deferred to his superior knowledge and kept quiet as her engines were as the stars rotated around each other.

**Author's Note:**

> This was re-uploaded due to technical issues.


End file.
